The interpretation of uncertainty in ecological rationality

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of uncertainty, scientific attention has focused primarily on probabilistic approaches, which predominantly rely on the assumption that uncertainty can be measured and expressed numerically. At the same time, the increasing amount of research from a range of areas including psychology, economics, and sociology testify that in the real world, people's understanding of risky and uncertain situations cannot be satisfactorily explained in probabilistic and decision-theoretical terms. In this article, we offer a theoretical overview of an alternative approach to uncertainty developed in the framework of the ecological rationality research program. We first trace the origins of the ecological approach to uncertainty in Simon's bounded rationality and Brunswik's lens model framework and then proceed by outlining a theoretical view of uncertainty that ensues from the ecological rationality approach. We argue that the ecological concept of uncertainty relies on a systemic view of uncertainty that features it as a property of the organism-environment system. We also show how simple heuristics can deal with unmeasurable uncertainty and in what cases ignoring probabilities emerges as a proper response to uncertainty.

Mycological rationality: Heuristics, perception and decision-making in mushroom foraging

“…2 Ecological rationality places the decisionmaker back into their ecological context. Broadly defined, ecological rationality can be understood in terms of cognitive success in the world, or the fit between the mind and the environment (Kozyreva and Hertwig 2019;Gigerenzer and Todd 1999;Todd and Brighton 2016). Thus, an action is ecologically rational if it is cognitively successful given a certain environmental context.…”

“…Thus, ecological rationality deals with how the minds of organisms compensate for their bounded cognitive resources by exploiting the structures and regularities of information in the task environments in which they are applied. From an ecological point of view, rational behaviour can therefore be understood as the adaptive capacity of an organism to achieve its intentions "under the constraints and affordances posed by both the environment and its own cognitive limitations" (Kozyreva and Hertwig 2019).…”

“…In fact, satisficing search heuristics or fast and frugal heuristics do not even seek to achieve optimality. Instead, by exploiting statistical regularities, or ecological validities (Brunswik 1956), within the environment, or by relying on habits and culturally acquired rules, ecologically rational individuals are able to circumvent the optimisation process altogether (Kozyreva and Hertwig 2019;Gigerenzer and Selten 2002).…”

“…The general message from three decades of research in ecological rationality suggests that good judgments do not necessarily require complex cognitive processes, and that, particularly in environments with high degrees of uncertainty, people often resort to simple heuristics when making decisions. Moreover, in such environments, simple rules might systematically outperform more complex judgments (Marewski, Gaissmaier, and Gigerenzer 2010;Todd and Gigerenzer 2012;Kozyreva and Hertwig 2019).…”

Familiarity‐Matching: An Ecologically Rational Heuristic for the Relationships‐Comparison Task

“…In bounded situations such as when people have limited time or lack useful information, they often solve problems well by using heuristics (e.g., Herzog & Hertwig, 2013;Marewski & Schooler, 2011;Otworowska, Blokpoel, Sweers, Wareham, & van Rooij, 2018), meaning that they make ecologically rational inferences through the use of simple strategies. Herbert Simon proposed the metaphor that effective behaviors are generated when context (environmental structures) and cognition (human computational capabilities) fit together like the blades of a pair of scissors-one blade being environmental structures and the other being human cognitive capacity (i.e., "Simon's scissors" metaphor) (Simon, 1990; see also Kozyreva & Hertwig, 2019;Lockton, 2012;Todd & Brighton, 2016). In fact, many previous works have demonstrated that, using binary choice tasks, the effectiveness of people's subjective memory experiences as inference cues is clearly explained in terms of the real-world environmental structures (e.g., Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002;Hertwig, Herzog, Schooler & Reimer, 2008;Herzog & Hertwig, 2013;Honda, Abe, Matsuka & Yamagishi, 2011;Honda, Matsuka & Ueda, 2017;Schooler & Hertwig, 2005;Xu, Gonz alez-Vallejo, Weinhardt, Chimeli & Karadogan, 2018; as a review, see Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 2011).…”